 OUPblog  Implicit negation is easy to miss One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation. This is much different than the overly fussy stigmatizing of double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” or “Nobody didn’t see anything,” which are common, colloquial, and not at all confusing. No one takes “I didn’t see nothing” to mean “I saw something.” Misnegation is a rather more complicated situation where a negation and a hidden negation conspire to trip up a writer, as in this example from a Hägar the Horrible comic strip (first noticed in a 2018 post by writer Stan Carey). Hägar says “This is the only time of year when I miss not having a nine-to-five job.” When his sidekick Lucky Eddie asks “Why?” Hägar says it’s because “I never get to go to an office Christmas party!” The word miss hides a negation and if you “miss not having a nine-to-five job,” you would be missing the absence of such a job. But what is meant here is that Hägar misses ever having a nine-to-fiver. Misnegations happen in speech quite frequently, but unless they are in print or online, we may overlook them. The term seems to have first cropped up in 2004, on the Language Log blog in a series of posts by the linguist Mark Liberman and others. Two of the most common types of misnegations involve expressions of the form: no NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB and it is IMPOSSIBLE to UNDERESTIMATE X The first type is found in examples like “no detail is too small to ignore,” where the intended meaning is “all details matter, regardless of how small,” or “no detail is too small to matter.” With the misnegation, it actually reads as if details are routinely ignored and none are too small to receive that treatment. Liberman offers some true-life examples: No one is too young to avoid being tempted. No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service, or invention. Kelly… said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore. No error is too small to ignore—I want to make the second edition perfect! If these make your head hurt, just wait. The second type of misnegation is found in examples like “It is impossible to underestimate Springsteen’s influence,” and many similar examples. If “overestimate” means to attribute too high a value and “underestimate” means to attribute too low a value, then one is saying “It is impossible to attribute too low a value to Springsteen’s influence,” which is presumably not what is meant, unless it is a backhanded compliment. Here are some more real examples: The challenge of creating weekly scripts that move seamlessly among six clearly defined principal characters cannot be underestimated. (Liberman found this one in The New York Times, 2004) All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. (from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, noted in Stan Carey’s post) Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated. (from Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, also noted by Carey) There are other types of misnegation as well. Ben Zimmer points out some examples of overnegation that arise from one too many nots: It’s HARD NOT TO X AND NOT Y. It’s hard not to walk into a press conference these days and not hear, at some point, “With scholarships where they are today…” (The Michigan Daily) But it’s hard not to read Olney’s book and not appreciate the key members of the team that dominated baseball for half a decade. (Deseret News) [In researching the period] it’s hard not to look at 1910 and not see what’s coming down the road. (Provincetown Banner) The first not in each example means that one is not doing the walking, reading, or looking. But if you are not doing those things how can you then not hear, not appreciate, or not see what’s coming. The first not in each example is causing the problem and needs to go. And Zimmer points that that you also get misnegation with the variant “It’s hard not to do X without doing Y” as in “It’s hard not to think of the art of New Mexico without thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe” (his example from the Tucson Weekly). And then there’s the phrasing “fail to miss,” where there is a pair of negative verbs and no not, and the expression is used to mean “fail to see.” That one was made famous by sportscaster Dizzy Dean, who told fans “don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.” For writers and editors, it’s important to be aware of the possibility of misnegation or overnegation. Editing and style guides don’t tell you to put things in the affirmative for nothing. Image by MasterTux from Pixabay. Public domain. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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